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Sittin' at the anime con...

...watchin' all the Angels go by.

4 July 2002

Ah, it's good to finally be back! We've been out of "circulation" for a while now and it's been a rough year. On the @a! front, things have settled down and we've had some time to look at how we do things here and have made some significant changes. As you can see visually, we've consolidated all the old issues of the magazine and got a standard format for all the pages. Now the navigation and the layout of things will hopefully help keep things consistent. We've also gone back to our issue based format. We found that trying to keep the magazine going without any definite deadlines really killed things. And to keep the magazine from going the way of some of our fellow publications we had to re-evaluate. After all the experiences and some of our failures, I think we've got the working solution for us. Deadlines will always be a tough thing, but we're working on ways to keep that problem to a minimum.

As I type this, I'm sitting here chillin' with some friends from the Fushigi Yuugi IRC channel here at Anime Expo 2002 in Long Beach, California. It's the first day of the con and things have been rather interesting so far. All the hustle and bustle of the con has been going around us as an editorial staff, and it's interesting to see how the trends of things have gone over the last year. The big thing this year seems to be the series Chobits and Angelic Layer (both of which we'll have as article topics in the near future. Two very cool series that are a lot of fun.) Chii from Chobits and Hikaru from Angelic Layer have been rather popular characters to cosplay this year. There's also the prerequisite Sailor Senshi all over and the usual Final Fantasy characters. Fairly typical for an anime con. Of course, this is just day one. There's three more days to go. The anime music video contest should be good this year as reported by some of the con staff. The masquerade should be some good stuff too. There's also a showing of the Cowboy Bebop movie, Knockin' On Heaven's Door... A lot of stuff to occupy my time.

And as I get ready to end this here, we'll be looking for more stuff to bring you in the coming months. Next issue we'll be bringing a con season wrapup, an Escaflowne feature and much more. But for now, it's time to get back to the con.